A MUSLIM man is believed to be the first in Australia to have been granted a judge-only trial on the ground a jury may have been biased because of his religious beliefs.

The decision can be revealed after Ismail Belghar, 36, yesterday pleaded guilty to detaining and assaulting his sister-in-law after she “dared” to take his wife of 11 years to the beach without his permission.

The prosecution was not happy with the judge supporting Mr Belghar’s view that he could not get a fair trial from 12 Aussie citizens:

The Crown appealed, arguing if Judge Solomon was correct every Muslim would be entitled to a judge-only trial.

Or at least an infidel-free jury.

(PS For those interested in the west’s incremental Islamization, I’ve written the foreword to Geert Wilders’ new book, Marked For Death.)

Police and social workers were last night accused of failing to investigate an Asian [muslim] paedophile gang for fear of being perceived as racist, allowing them to prey on up to 50 young white girls.

"This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness," she said.

"They had a greater fear of being perceived in that light than in dealing with the issues in front of them."

Girl A told police that she had been raped and provided DNA evidence from her [muslim] attacker, however the CPS twice decided not to prosecute him.

The 15 year-old's abuse continued and at its height she was being driven to flats and houses to be raped by up to five [muslim] men a night, four or five days a week. She was singled out because she was white, vulnerable and under-age.

Her ordeal only ended when her teachers forced social workers to intervene after she fell pregnant and they became concerned by the number of [muslim] Asian men picking her up from school.

Girl A said that in a six-hour interview she gave police details about her [muslim] abusers and where the attacks took place. Crucially, too, she handed officers underwear that proved she had been raped by two [muslim] men in a single attack.

"I hoped they were going to do something and it would stop," she said.

"But it just carried on. It just started again with different [muslim] men and more [muslim] men this time, and that's when it started becoming up to five [muslim] men a day".

Greater Manchester Police is now being investigated by the IPCC over the failings of its first investigation in 2008.

When GMP did finally pass a file on Girls A's rape to the CPS the following year, a Crown lawyer decided not to charge anyone because he said she would not be a sufficiently credible witness to put before a jury. A second CPS lawyer backed that opinion.

It was only after social workers notice an upsurge in cases of child grooming that police reinvestigated and made a series of arrests which led to yesterday's convictions.

It can be reported that the trial was delayed by two weeks when two Asian barristers quit the case due to intimidation by far right groups outside Liverpool Crown Court.

And a tweet from BNP leader Nick Griffin almost caused the trial to collapse when it led to allegations of the jury having a "far-right bias".

Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood acknowledged that officers could have dealt with the case "better than we did".

But he denied that the girl's complaints had been "brushed under the carpet" because officers were reluctant to confront the issue of race.

"At the time we did what we thought was best," he said. "We have learned a lot of lessons.

"The issue here is genuinely about vulnerability. It just happens that they are Asian men. In no way did we sweep it under the carpet."

Steve Garner, head of children's services at Rochdale Council, denied the teenager had been let down by his department.

"No," he said. "I think it's really important to remember that what we know now and what we knew in 2008 is very, very different and what we have done is put the lessons in place".

Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk said: "What's become clear is that if police had acted seriously on these concerns in 2008 many of the victims of this appalling case would not have had to go through such horrific trauma.

"It is simply unacceptable that these young women were let down in this way by people they should have been able to trust."

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker received more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major Democratic candidates got combined.

In North Carolina, “No Preference” garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack Obama.

In West Virginia, “A felon incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37 percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the remaining 63 percent.”

I’m sure the night could have gone worse for Democrats, but… I’m not sure how.

In an interview with NRO, Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock, fresh off his primary victory against Senator Dick Lugar, says he feels “really badly” for his opponent tonight. “I know what it’s like to lose,” Mourdock says. “It’s a tremendous feeling of disappointment. I feel really badly for him; I really do.”

At the time Mourdock spoke with NRO, he hadn’t heard from the senator personally, though he was quick to add that he had been preoccupied with preparing for his victory speech. Asked if he would like to campaign with Lugar in the fall, Mourdock replies, “I would certainly welcome that if that’s something he would like to do.”

In his concession speech earlier tonight, Lugar, who had long refused to say whether he would support Mourdock after the primary, told supporters that “I want to see my friend Mitch McConnell have a Republican majority in the Senate. I hope my opponent prevails in November to contribute to that Republican majority.”

Sixty-one percent of the vote for Mourdock with 99 percent of precincts reporting. That’s a solid win.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Tuesday distanced himself from the candidacy of Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), saying he had “not gotten involved” in the closely watched race even though a group linked to Cantor is backing the embattled Indiana senator.

The Young Guns Network, an advocacy group run by former top Cantor aides, is actively supporting Lugar in his primary fight with Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock and has spent more than $100,000 sending mailers urging a vote for Lugar. The primary is Tuesday, and Lugar is expected to lose.

“I have not gotten involved in that race, and this is an outside group that I have no control over,” Cantor told reporters in the Capitol when asked what message Lugar’s defeat could send.

It’s not that Richard Lugar is a bad man; it’s just that you should be able to accomplish what you came to do in Washington within thirty-six years or so. You can’t be a reformer of Washington in your seventh term.

Back in 1996 I was a smart-alecky TNR intern eager to wisecrack my way into print. Richard Lugar was a Republican senator running one of the most hopeless presidential campaigns in modern history. Lugar was an awful candidate. His grimacing, mechanical approach to primary-state retail politics made Steve Forbes look like Warren Beatty. Stating the obvious during the campaign, he told one reporter, “I’ve never purported to be an entertainer or performer or a bon vivant.” His candidacy was instead based on that perennially losing theme of technocratic mastery. Lugar’s edge was that, as a hardworking 20-year senator, he simply knew the issues better than anyone else did. Naturally, his candidacy went nowhere.

And so perhaps the most rational, levelheaded candidate of all time, acted like a maniacal dictator: He went nuclear. In December 1995 Lugar ran a four- part ad campaign telling the story, docudrama-style, of terrorists who steal three Russian nuclear warheads and threaten to detonate them in the United States. In one spot, a little girl plaintively asks at bedtime, “Mommy, won’t the bomb wake everybody up?” Others depicted panicky aides begging a befuddled president for guidance. The implication was that most presidential candidates would be ill-equipped to deal with such a calamity. But not Lugar.

Long before The Sum of All Fears gave Americans mass nightmares, Lugar had become fixated on the possibility that former Soviet nukes might be stolen and exploded on American soil; he had spent countless hours working on that very question in the Senate. And so the ads concluded with Lugar, looking solemn–and, back then, vaguely ridiculous–issuing his grave warning: “Nobody wants to talk about nuclear terrorism. But hiding from it won’t make it go away.” In those blissfully ignorant days Lugar’s doomsday ads felt like a desperate, even exploitative, ploy. And so I smugly typed out a short, unsigned item for TNR’s “Notebook,” declaring that Lugar had “managed to undermine the one element that sets him apart from his competitors: seriousness.” That showed him! Today Lugar’s nightmare scenario feels rather less cartoonish…

Dick Lugar, bless him, saw this coming a decade ago. And he’s probably worked harder than anyone else in Congress to protect us. A program he formed with then-Georgia Senator Sam Nunn in 1991 has spent billions keeping nuclear weapons from reaching our shores. Nunn-Lugar pays for everything from alarm systems at a plutonium dump in Belarus to gainful employment for bribe- susceptible former Soviet nuclear scientists. It’s that rarest of federal programs: forward-looking, efficient–and utterly lacking a political constituency.

This is not the retirement circumstances you wanted, Senator Lugar, but we can thank you for your service nonetheless.

As Peter tees up the interview, he compares and contrasts the insight of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Ronald Reagan into the Soviet Union. Schlesinger is a stand-in for the many intellectuals who got the Soviet Union wrong. How could they have erred so badly while Reagan got it right?

You will want to stick with this 52-minute interview all the way through to the end. They get to Barack Obama at around 37 minutes into the interview. It’s worth the wait. Quotable quote: “Obama has an absolute talent for saying things that make no sense, that not only sound plausible but inspiring.” In the last minute or two of the interview Sowell powerfully laments the erosion of our freedom. Don’t miss it!

When Peter last hosted Sowell on the show, he prefaced the interview with a chip of William Buckley’s introduction of Sowell on Firing Line 30 years ago. In the clip Buckley saluted Sowell for being “a scholar who has devoted his labors to looking behind the cliches of abjection.” The same thought applies several times over to this interview.

The interview is wide-ranging and enjoyable. Through our arrangement with the Hoover Institution, we are pleased to present this installment of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson in its entirety. Please check it out.

Some cocktail napkin math and most likely incorrect analysis of yesterday’s recall primary under the fold for anyone who is interested.

The results of yesterday’s recall election held some real surprises for me – not with the results, but with the percentages involved.

There seems to have been very little crossover. Wisconsin is an open primary state so you could choose to vote in either parties primary for either recall (governor and lt. governor). I voted in the R primary for governor and crossed over to vote in the D primary for lt. governor since the R had no opposition. Personally, I think these open primaries are sort of stupid, and the primaries should be paid for by the parties, but those are different subjects for a different day. The main thrust is that there appears to have been little crossover.

There was a fake Republican on the R side going up against Walker. The results: Walker – 626,538 – 97% Kohl-Riggs – 19,920 – 3% It is a certainty that almost all of those 19,920 votes were crossovers.

So we get a rematch of 2010. Can you believe this? After all of that bucket drumming, chanting, marching around the square, crashing in and trashing of the capitol building, and all the rest, we have the same exact match up we had in 2010. The Democrat party effectively kneecapped the left and progressives by putting a figurative bullet to the head of Falk. I have heard from friends that Obama/Emmanuel had something to do with this but don’t have any firm proof.

Falk early on said she would do everything in her power to repeal Walker’s reforms and put things “right” for the government unions. She received early endorsements from EVERY government union and AFSCME was even running early attack ads against Barrett. The Democrats understood early on that a “union” candidate would get blasted by Walker so they began their “war on women” and crushed Falk. Barrett is a much more centrist candidate. Many of the left will still crawl over broken glass to vote for him, much like conservatives with Romney, but it has got to be a bitter pill to swallow to see how the left and unions were played by the Dems. Hilarious to me, though.

So lets look at this turnout – the Democrats cast a total of 670,278 votes. Hey, wait a minute. That isn’t even close to the number of petitions filed for the recall in the first place (around one million supposedly). What is up with that? Only a few things can be surmised.

Massive peition fraud. People signed just to feel good, or get a family member or someone else out of their face. People didn’t understand what they were signing. Something else?

I don’t get that at all. Hey, YOU are the ones that wanted this stupid recall and you aren’t even going to vote in the primary now to select the candidate to go against the dark lord Walker? Sheesh. What a scam.

The republican turnout was impressive – 646,458 votes – almost MORE than the Dems and for the R’s, there wasn’t really anything to vote for. I am pleasantly surprised at this.

By Barrett winning, it is absolutely clear now that this isn’t about collective bargaining for government unions anymore. It is a power grab by one party over another, plain and simple. Barrett has campaigned FAR away from the union issue and I can only assume will continue to do so.

So prediction time, and a little crystal ball stuff.

I think Walker will win. I also think that the Senate will flip from R to D. I believe there are four state senate races to be decided in the general recall election on June 5. It is going to be a LONG month up here with robocalls, ads, and all the rest.

But what if Walker loses? Well, it isn’t the end of the world. We will have a corporatist, centrist governor who won’t try to take down everything Walker has done. And he won’t be able to because the Assembly is in firm control of the R’s, and appears that it will be for a generation. The legislative business is done for this year and many people will forget a lot of things by the time November rolls around and we have yet another election. When I vote for President in November, it will be the fifth or sixth time I have voted this year. I am sick of it as are many others. But don’t forget what the despicable Russ Feingold said last year – the game’s not over until we win.

If Walker loses, he will be free to help Washington get its crap together, or he could come back in 2014 to run again for governor here in Wisconsin (when the current term for governor ends).